Driftwood (Madera Del Agua)

These days
made manifest
by the bars of song
+ injustice
the skeletons incarnate forgetmenots
We grieve aire
air
+ flutter in the chest
gannets + gulls
we breathe
greensun
+ our lungs fill
w/ tropical yellows
we speak
s e a
+ move between waking horizons
stars + corals wink
again
s e a
+ all the driftwood
runs aground on reefs in expectation

Convictions of Swallows (Convicción de Golondrinas)

W/ the utter conviction of swallows
plant a tree unknowing
nor reap a child
w/ the bag packed for the next
morning
we collect
a table
two chairs
+ some mugs
we made a portable bookshelf
of blocks + boards:
we knotted Marx
the Bible
Mao Tse Tung
those twenty love poems and that
song of despair.
Between an open eye
+ the other closed
the rivers of whens + further whens
dried.
Sandino
Che
Angela Davis
populated the orphanry of walls
w/ berets
+ surplus pants;
No amnesty
the autumns overflowed the cups
of Septembers
Octobers
+ rusted Decembers
while the vernal
fairy godmother
insists we have
a small bit of home.
On the table
w/ patience
we serve the convictions of swallows,
the roaches smile with the
thought,
the bag is packed
For a tomorrow or over,
the heart waits for us
at the salt line.

Diana Morán

Panamanian poet and radical activist, Diana Morán, created her major works in the tumult of the 1960s and '70s. Despite winning the first Ricardo Miró National Literature Award for poetry, she was forced into exile as an active Marxist by the successive conservative and reformist military coups that overthrew the preceding government in the late '60s. Labeled a criminal reactionary by Torrijos and Noriega, Morán found a permanent home-in-exile in Mexico City, teaching at the Metropolitan Autonomous University. She passed away in 1987; her cremains were secretly scattered into the Canal in 2004.

Ash Ponders

Panamanian poet, translator and photographer, Ash Ponders, works in the Sonoran Desert. He has no chapbooks or forthcoming works that you can purchase. He just wants you to follow him on Instagram and Twitter. He’s not dead yet.